AIC President Dr. Hooshang Amirahmadi recently responded to the controversial Ben Rhodes profile in the New York Times magazine, offering his thoughts on the status of the nuclear accord. Dr. Amirahmadi said that while the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was formally adopted only last year, the road to the accord was paved by the White House and Supreme Leader Khamenei years earlier and included an “engineered” 2013 presidential election in which Mr. Rouhani was the preferred candidate.

Asked about Ben Rhodes’s statements on Iranian hardliners vs. moderates, Dr. Amirahmadi said, “The White House spread propaganda that in Iran there are “hardliners” and “moderates” and that they are dealing with the moderates. In fact, Obama was almost always dealing with the hardliners, the top of whom is Khamenei; but, in the media, it was presented as if he was dealing with moderates like Rouhani and Zarif.”

Kayvon Afshari managed the campaign to elect Hooshang Amirahmadi as President of Iran. In this role, he directed the campaign’s event planning, publicity, online social media, web analytics, and delivered speeches.
Mr. Afshari has also been working at the CBS News foreign desk for over five years. He has coordinated coverage of Iran’s 2009 post-election demonstrations, the Arab Spring, the earthquake in Haiti, and many other stories of international significance.
He holds a Master in International Relations from New York University’s Department of Politics, and graduated with distinction from McGill University in 2007 with a double major in political science and Middle Eastern studies. At NYU, his research focused on quantitative analysis and the Middle East with an emphasis on US-Iran relations. In his 2012 Master’s thesis, he devised a formula to predict whether Israel would launch a pre-emptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, concluding that an overt strike would not materialize.